News.com: Crypto Doesn't Kill - People Do

McSpew writes: "Bravo to News.com for telling the truth about cryptography. They even cited /.'s coverage of Phil Zimmerman's real views on PGP and its possible role in any terrorist acts." On a per-word basis, this may be the best summary of why calls to ban or restrict encryption technology (as with government key escrow, or constrained key sizes) has little to do with enhancing national or world security.

Comments

one-time pads

[corebreech]

A good article that could be made better by emphasizing the one-time pad cipher.

The one-time pad is a very easy cipher to explain to lay people. They need no understanding of math, not even arithmetic.

Anybody, anywhere can create a one-time pad by simply flipping a coin or rolling the dice, and use the resulting information to encrypt a message that is impervious to all manners of cryptoanalysis, even techniques made possible by the much-feared though yet-to-be-stocked quantum computer.

In other words, you can create a encrypted message without encryption software or even a computer, and yet be assured that the message is unreadable by any computer devisable today or anytime in the future.

There should be no debate here. Military-grade cryptography is available to anyone with a penny in their pocket and a sheet of paper and pencil.

We need to stop wasting time talking about this.

Re:one-time pads

[AndrewHowe]

"each message contains in it the one time pad for the next message"
This is not such a good idea. A one time pad is to be used once, and that means you certainly can't repeat it within a single message. Therefore, each message would have to contain a one time pad that was large enough to encrypt the whole of the next message, including the one time pad in that, and so on. Obviously this means your messages will get shorter and shorter!

Re:one-time pads

[Sly Mongoose]

If you have a secure channel to transfer the one-time pad why bother with encryption in the first place?

Because you can exchange fat one-time pads when all the conspirators are crouched around a camel-dung fire one night. Then use the pad for secure communications over the weeks and months that follow.

That pad must to somehow be secured like a codebook or it is useless.

It is much more difficult to frisk every person on the street looking for a one-time pad than it is to CARNIVORE every e-mail on the backbone and peek through the backdoor.

One-time pads is a wonderful theoretical idea but one that is useless in most real world applications.

If secure communications are required and backdoors are a threat, the inconvenience will have to be tolerated.

Crypto Kills

[Anonymous Coward]

Re read that article, but swap every occurrence of "crypto" with "guns".

Now you know what all the gun nuts were talking about.

It's already been done wth handguns - I figured all guns were next, but looks like crypto is next.

He's missed the point

[WolfWithoutAClause]

The security agencies are already checking through most or a statistical useful percentage of the bytes that flow over the US internet, and are characterising it all. Their actions only make sense if they are doing that.

Anyone using encryption stands out; so they write a file on them.

Where they find encrypted data they can't characterise it any further; so they hit a brick wall. But its not common right now, so they can make a file. However, if everyone on the internet routinely uses uncrackable encryption they can't build a file on everyone.

On the other hand, if they have key escrow they can blow away the encryption on all the legitimate data and they are left with 'illegal' encryption; except presumably terrorists and other malcontents; a much smaller group that they can write files on.

Of course this 'monitor all the traffic on the internet idea' falls down in several other ways. As an example, suppose somebody creates a Quake III server that has some sort of low bandwidth messaging in it perhaps the player steps left at careful timed moments or something, the characterisation by the NSA would be, oh its just another Quake player, when really its sending an encrypted message as well. [I just made that Quake idea up- its called 'steganography' in general, hiding encrypted messages in something else.]

Anyway, that's really what's going on. The security agencies are using the WTC disaster as a chance to get their legislation through whilst the going is good. Of course anyone with any sense can evade it, but not every terrorist has sense.

Re:He's missed the point

[rknop]

On the other hand, if they have key escrow they can blow away the encryption on all the legitimate data and they are left with 'illegal' encryption; except presumably terrorists and other malcontents; a much smaller group that they can write files on.

You already note one good way of getting past this: stenography, hiding the message in something that looks legitimate. (Your low-bandwidth Quake motion idea was a good one.) There is another: nested encryption. Presumably, unless somebody is already suspected, the monitoring agencies aren't going to be allowed to read the contents of all of this mail and so forth without a warrant. (Yeah, yeah, I know, I'm being foolish, but bear with me.) As such, all they will be able to do is verify that the message is encrypted with a legal, escrow-available key.

So somebody wanting to use illegal encryption encrypts their message with their own crypto, and then encryptes that ciphertext with legal crypto. It will pass the sniffer, but will still be unreadable if somebody gets a warrant and uses the escrowed key on the outer crypto. It won't do the statistical guys any good since their statistics pass will say that these people are using the legal crypto just like everybody else.

As has been noted elsewhere, trying to put controls and limits on this sort of thing is completely quixotic. The only thing which is going to make people copy is a desire to be compliant with the laws. As such, the only people that the laws hinder and restrict are the law-abiding citiziens that (theoretically) the laws aren't directed at. There are two possible motivations for these laws: one, a real misunderstanding of how quixotic trying to regulate crypto would really be. Or, two, a much more sinister desire to get the mechanism in place to monitor every citizen. Choose which motivation you think is behind all of this based on your own level of paranoia and how cynical you are about how naive our leaders are vs. how sinister they are.

-Rob

Close, but not quite....

[Deskpoet]

Though I agree with everything you said, the fundamental problem goes a bit deeper than privacy.

The full underlying cause of this is nationalism and the belief that the State is an almost divine entity that will protect you from all ills provided you play by its rules.

History shows that this is a fool's bargain. Any state--and yes, flag-wavers, that includes the US--is *designed* to limit your freedoms for the "greater good". While this works for a great many people indoctrinated to accept the definitions the State provides for "freedom" and "democracy", it is not, nor has it ever been, a complete solution for people in the world, and *much* has been done in the name of the State--like much was done in the name of God before it--that is simply hateful and evil.

Allegiance to the State, a belief that the State is all, that you should be proud to be part of the State, happened in Germany in the 1930s, and it appears to be happening here. Based on some of the troll posts here, you just have to substitute Arab for Jew, and you have the basic plank of the Nazi party flying in full colors.

How does this relate to crypto? It doesn't really at all--that's the point. But, if we're really trying to make a connection, then there's the tenuous observation that crypto is math, and knows no allegiance to State, which has no allegiance to you, meaning that Crypto is like the State in that it is an abstract concept without any feeling or allegiance to anyone or anything. The major difference between Crypto and the State is that the State is established, has full access to social control mechanisms, and panders to people's senses of belonging while Crypto is simply math that individuals can use to keep pieces of themselves from the State and unto themselves.

It is natural that the State--which *fully* seeks the totality of National Socialism, and now has the capacity to make _1984_ look like a Disneyland ride--would seek to abolish the one tool that can put an individual on equal footing with it. It's up to *us* to drop our allegiance to one abstract concept and rally our efforts around the other.

I'll leave it up to you to decide which way the wind appears to be blowing.